


Delancey

by Shanghaijim



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: F/M, Interracial Relationship, Siblings, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-07
Updated: 2012-05-07
Packaged: 2020-08-14 17:47:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20196220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shanghaijim/pseuds/Shanghaijim
Summary: Some New York kids dream of a better life way out west. Others turn into Morris Delancey.





	Delancey

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Mike Faist's Morris, but inclusive of movie canon as well.

Morris was two when Oscar was born. He remembered a lot of shrieking from his momma and poppa’s bedroom in the back, but Uncle Weese took him outside to feed the chickens. “Watch it, Mouse!” said Uncle Weese, ten years older than Morris’s momma and the only one of the Wiesels still alive in Manhattan. “Don’t get too close. Even a chicken can draw blood.” Morris, scared and confused, looked at the clawmarks on his hand, then up at Uncle Weese and understood.

Uncle Weese’s already narrow eyes shrank to beads at the sound of an approaching ruckus. “Go back inside, Mouse,” he told Morris, but Morris knew one of the loud voices was his poppa, and he didn’t want to go in, the shrieks were still scary.

His poppa smelled and walked unsteadily. He was with his friends, who also smelled, were loud, and walked unsteadily. The sun was harsh and the day was hot and the chickens were pecking around Morris’s ankles as his poppa staggered up the path from the corner through the planted furrows of their farm.

Uncle Weese sounded nasty. “Look at you. You bum.”

Morris’s poppa raised a bottle in his hand. “Get off my land.”

“My baby sister’s in the back having another one of your rats and you’re out drinking.”

“What’s a man to do? That’s woman’s work. Anyway, they’re my friends.”

“They’re trying to get you to sell your land.”

“And maybe I will!”

Uncle Weese hit Morris’s poppa and sent him sprawling. Morris cried out and ran to defend him.

Morris’s poppa struggled to get up. “You dirty heeb!”

Uncle Weese wasn’t finished. He’d gotten a stick from the pile of kindling by the stoop and had raised it as a club. “Mouse, get outta the way!”

Morris shook his head. His chubby little hands were curled into fists. “No!”

For a moment his uncle looked at him with soft eyes.

Then his poppa shoved him aside and sent him sprawling among the chickens. “Outta my way, rat!”

Morris started to cry. “Poppa! Poppa!” They had to stop when the midwife came out to tell them Oscar was born, but by then Morris had realized no one cared if he cried.

There was something wrong with Oscar. Morris was seven when he figured it out. The farm was dying and almost all the chickens were gone, too old for laying and too tough to sell to anyone, but still, it was wrong what Oscar did.

“What did you do that for?” Morris had to ask, staring at the bloody mess at the back of the coop.

Oscar, five, was giggling. “I made it dead!” he said, his hands stained and crusted with feathers.

Morris didn’t say nothing. He took his baby brother to the water pump to wash off. Then he cleaned up the mess and the chicken. It was still a waste if they didn’t eat it.

Morris was fifteen when he had his first girl. She was called Kaye. She was a black girl from Brooklyn who worked for the Chinaman Li on the street his pop boasted was their own, but she never made Morris pay. She liked him, she said. “I like your eyes,” she said, silly things girls said to fellas they fancied, but secretly Morris liked to hear her say it.

Sometimes if he didn’t have to go home, and how often did he not want to go back to the dirty farm south of Houston, that single city block of fallow scrub and empty coops surrounded by more and more new buildings with cast iron faces, those times he’d stay with her in her room at the Chinaman’s. She had this sachet of perfume that smelled of flowers that helped cover up the stench of the sheets and the chamber pot and the other fellas who had her. He liked being there. Liked lying in her bed, her head tucked against his shoulder, his bare hips against her bare bottom, his cock temporarily soft after a good screwing, her skin glistening golden in the gaslight. “Maybe,” he’d start to say.

“Maybe what?”

He never finished. There was no getting away. There was this kid from Hell’s Kitchen, Oscar’s age, some little mick with a big mouth, who was always talking about going west, of getting out of the city, of starting fresh somewhere else. Morris heard about him from Oscar, who thought the kid was a joke, the way he thought everything was a joke. Morris didn’t think it was a joke. Not a funny one anyway. There’s no getting away. Still, with Kaye, he dreamed, and caressed her, not to get her to let him screw her again, just because he liked to touch her and she liked to be touched.

Morris was seventeen when he woke up to find his parents gone.

Uncle Weese arrived in a carriage at the farm while he was still searching. Oscar was leaning on the stoop with his hands in his pockets as if nothing had happened. “Uncle Weese!” Morris shouted, running up to meet him. “Where’d they go? What the hell’s going on?”

“They’ve split, Mouse,” Uncle Weese replied. “I’m gonna look after youse now.”

“Split?” Morris cried. “What the hell you mean split? They can’t just beat it! What about the farm? What about Oscar?”

Oscar giggled. He had grown handsome in his way. He had a lot of girlfriends for fifteen. He had to. Kaye had told Morris what Oscar did to girls when he screwed them. Morris believed it. He knew his brother.

Uncle Weese folded his arms. “Farm’s sold,” he told Morris. “That’s why they split. They took half and moved somewhere. I don’t know. Uptown I think. Your old man, the dirty bastard, he didn’t tell me. The other half he give to me, for the two of you.”

“Screw the farm,” Oscar said. “And screw them. Who needs ‘em?” He walked up to Morris, clapped him on the shoulders, beaming. “It’s always been me and you, bro. Delanceys against the world.”

“Pack up your chattel, boys,” said Uncle Weese. “Youse moving outta SoHo.”

Uncle Weese lived in the Lower East Side. Morris never really liked the place, but the dame his uncle was seeing, and the others, they said if their ma was a Jew, so were they. Morris didn’t know nothing about any of it and didn’t want to. As far as he could see, there was only one force at work in the world, and that was, whoever was quickest, strongest, smartest, they were the ones who kept their head above water. They were the rats who kept swimming no matter how much a nor’easter could flood the sewers.

His brother, now he was smart. Oscar knew big words. Oscar could even read. It was a struggle for Morris. He couldn’t make sense of words. The letters were all mixed up and backwards whenever he tried. It made his head ache. At school long ago his teachers figured out he was stupid and a borderline idiot and stopped trying. He got by. Oscar was the brains, though. Sometimes he had too much brains for his own good. Then Morris had to bail him out.

It was maybe a month after him and Oscar moved in with their uncle when Morris made enough dough to go back to Chinaman Li’s to see Kaye. When he asked for her, though, the Chinaman only said she was gone.

Morris grabbed the old man by his beard and yanked him over the counter, spilling ashes from the incense burner next to the opium pipe.

“What the hell you mean she’s gone?” he raged. “Where is she? Where’d she go?” He raised his fist.

The Chinaman seemed completely calm. “Brooklyn,” he said, without a trace of the accent he used to deceive the ignorant.

Morris hit him.

“Where?”

Across the Bridge Morris raced, on foot, faster than any trolley or cab. He went to the first kid he saw and demanded to know where to find Spot Conlon.

The Navy Yards were always busy, but some of the older piers were worn out. One of them, a jungle of rotting wood and twisted rope and seagulls and wheels, was where Spot Conlon held court. He was just some kid, Morris realized, but he was surrounded by men and boys who were practically men, all of them bigger than Morris and some nearly as tall.

“What you want, rat?” said Spot Conlon from his driftwood throne.

“I’m looking for a girl,” Morris replied.

Chuckles. “Well I think you have the wrong address,” Conlon said.

Morris lunged at him. One of the big boys grabbed him and held him back while another stuffed him in the gut. Morris doubled over, seeing stars.

“Kaye,” he blurted out. “Her name is Kaye. She’s a colored girl who used to work for Chinaman Li on Delancey Street.” He tasted salt on his lips and hoped it was blood and not tears.

The other boys were still laughing at him, and Morris could have killed them all for it, but Spot Conlon was not one of them. When Morris stole a glance at him, the little lord of Brooklyn had eyes gone ice-cold.

“What’s your name?” Conlon demanded.

“D-Delancey,” Morris said.

Spot shot to his feet. “Boys!” he thundered. “Bust the hell outta him!”

Morris gave as good as he could. He was a fighter. Life was for the fierce, and whatever he wasn’t, he was fierce. But there were more of them, and most of them his size or bigger.

It was dark when he came to. He was in some alley where they’d thrown him. His eyes were swollen nearly shut and his teeth were busted, he could taste gum where there had been molar. He could barely stand.

Spot Conlon was there. He had a cane, a gentleman’s walking stick, its knob shiny brass and harder than bone. Morris now remembered it hitting him.

“You be glad I ain’t currently in the position to deal with you what I should,” said the boy, ostensibly a newsie, who commanded the street thugs of the Brooklyn waterfront. “My patrons, see, they don’t want more of a mess like the last time. But you ought to be dead. Understand that. If that girl had died, you would be. You ought to burn in hell for what you did to her.”

He took a nickel out of his pocket and placed it on the pavement inches from Morris’s swollen eyes. “Here’s trolley fare back to Manhattan. Don’t cross the bridge again.”

Morris coughed and sniffled blood, curled up in the back of the trolley across the bridge. He was the only passenger on board that late in the evening. The only other people there were the conductor, the driver, and the brakeman.

“Fare,” said the conductor. Morris painfully dug in his pocket for the nickel Spot Conlon had given him.

The conductor whistled. “Jesus, kid, you look like you was drug outta the river. Who worked you over like that?”

Morris shook his head.

The conductor seemed more amused than concerned. “Hey, Delancey. Look at this kid! Looks like he just got back from Indian territory!”

Morris hurt too much to turn around, or do anything. He just knew. He knew it even before his father, the brakeman, glanced his way and said, “Christ, boy, if I was you I’d jump off the bridge and put myself out of misery!”

He didn’t know him. Of course he didn’t. Morris looked like a mess. And his father had never really cared to get to know either of his sons, did he?

One day, he vowed. One day, poppa, you’ll wish you did.

But that was one confrontation that would have to wait.

They slept in the same room, the other room aside from the bedroom where Uncle Weese and his squeeze shacked up. Oscar was fast asleep, or pretending to be, when Morris grabbed him by the throat and started squeezing.

Oscar’s eyes opened. In the dimness cast by the gaslamps outside they focused on Morris. They went wide, and then narrowed. His hands went to Morris’s, but he didn’t struggle. He just kept staring at Morris, into Morris’s eyes, even as he started to turn from red to blue.

Morris let go. He got up instead while Oscar gasped for air, went to Uncle Weese’s liquor, poured himself a drink, and sat down on the rickety chair by the table, hurt in every way.

Oscar got his breath back. “I knew you couldn’t do it,” he said. “I knew you couldn’t hurt me. Not for real.”

He was right, of course. Which made Morris a fool, and worse.

Slurred by pain and injury and alcohol, he asked: “What did you do to her?”

Oscar smiled. He was the looker of the two of them. The girls went crazy over him. At first. “Nothing I don’t usually do,” he said. “You know I like it when they cry.”

Then, just a little, he looked sorry. “She kind of asked for you, though. While I was, you know.” He shrugged. “I guess I went a little too far.”

“I ought to kill you,” Morris said.

“But you didn’t,” Oscar pointed out. “And I know why.” Now he sprang from the cot and knelt before his brother. “Who you love more, Mouse? Some frail, or me?” He smiled again. “We’re all we got is each other. We’re the Delancey brothers!”

Morris stared down at his brother. This monster. The only family he had.

There was no getting out. You either had to sink, or swim. Only the fiercest survived.


End file.
